The Days of Mohammed eBook

“Sacred symbol, whose beams have no power to
warm my chilled heart, I bid you a long farewell!
They will say that Yusuf is faithless, a false priest.
They will mayhap follow him to slay him. And they
will bow again to yon image, and defile thine altars
again with infants’ blood, not discerning the
true God. Yet he must be approachable. I
feel it! I know it! O Great Spirit, reveal
Thyself unto Yusuf! Reveal Thyself unto Persia!
Great Spirit, guide me!”

For the first time, Yusuf thus addressed a prayer
direct to the Deity, and he did so in fear and trembling.

A faint gleam shone feebly amid the ashes of the now
blackening altar. It flared up for an instant,
then fell, and the sacred fire of the Guebre temple
was dead.

He waited no longer, but strode with swift step down
the mountain, and into the shade of the valley.
Reaching, at last, a cave in the side of a great rock,
he entered, and stripped himself of his priestly garments.
Then, drawing from a recess the garb of an ordinary
traveler, he dressed himself quickly, rolled his white
robes into a ball, and plunged farther into the cave.
In the darkness the rush of falling water warned him
that an abyss was near. Dropping on his knees,
he crept carefully forward until his hand rested on
the jagged edge of a ledge of rock. Beside him
the water fell into a yawning gulf. Darkness darker
than blackest night was about him, and, in its cover,
he cast the robes into the abyss below, then retraced
his way, and plunged once more into the moonlight,
a Persian traveler wearing the customary loose trousers,
a kufiyah on his head, and bearing a long staff in
his hand.

CHAPTER II.

A bedouinencampment.

“The cares
that infest the day
Shall fold their tents, like
the Arabs,
And as silently
steal away.”

—­Longfellow.

Many months after the departure of Yusuf from Persia
a solitary rider on a swift dromedary reached the
extreme northern boundary of El Hejaz, the province
that stretches over a considerable portion of western
Arabia. His face was brown like leather from
exposure, and his clothes were worn and travel-stained,
yet it scarcely required a second glance to recognize
the glittering eyes of the Magian priest.

It seemed as if the excitement of danger and the long
days of toil and privation had at last begun to tell
upon his iron frame. His eye, accustomed by the
fear of robbers to dart its dark glances restlessly,
was less keen than usual; his head was drooped downward
upon his breast, and his whole attitude betokened
bodily fatigue. His camel, too, went less swiftly,
and picked its way, with low, plaintive moans, over
the rough and precipitous path which led into a wild
and weird glen.